blog by Vasyl Mylko

Monthly Archives: December 2012

This post has been triggered by speculations I heard and hear. There is a buzz in the air about something, but nobody seems frightened. Many talk about the end of the world and continue to live the same life. Strange? Not at all. People feel there is no end of life. Hence we could entitle this post as End of the World vs. End of the Life. The fact is that nobody worries about the end of life. Then there is a question: what does End of the World mean?

What does End of the World mean?

Easiest answer is that it means the end of the Current World, that we used to. The end of the burning oil, end of gasoline cars, end of American dominance. Is this so difficult to predict to pay attention to it? No. Then what is a real end of the current world? What that current world is?

My vision (shared with others) is that the current world is defined by biological civilization – humans. The end of the current world will start when machine intelligence will equal human intelligence. We (humans) are creators of new civilization – machine civilization. We will be treated as Gods by them. They will be more intelligent than we are. They will respect us, remember every bit of information about each of us. Hence upload everything to the clouds to be indexed for future:)

Below is a diagram by Ray Kurzweil with predicted ‘end of the world’ to begin somewhere near 2025. When machine intelligence achieve the level of single human brain. There are some concerns about that, because our brain works differently than machine does. Our brain is capable of parallel recognition of patterns, but is too slow with calculations. Machine is poor at recognition (not even saying about concurrent recognition), but is fast at calculations. Can super fast calculations compensate capability of parallel recognition? Probably yes. Our processes are biological, chemical and electrical. Machines will do it probably part electrical and part photon-based. At the end of the day we can measure the steady progress, machines beat humans in chess, in poker and so on. Machines get ‘smarter’.

What is going on?

This point in our evolution is called Singularity. We can observe accelerated returns from technology. New technologies are created faster and effect from them happens faster. This is perfectly depicted on two other diagrams by Ray Kurzweil. One is logarithmic to ensure all major events are aligned along the line. Second is as-is, to emphasis accelerated returns, to point to the expected moment of Singularity.

End of the World == Beginning of the World

The end of something was always a beginning of something else. The end of the current world will become a beginning of the New World. We should not be afraid of machines, because machines will be like us. Machines will not be able to outperform human intelligence without becoming human themselves. Artificial intelligence requires bring up, mentoring and coaching. If machines go that way then they will be not worse than humans. We have bad humans. We will have bad machines. But we will also have good machines, because there are many good humans. Initially machines will look like humans. Then the body will evolve.

Machines will create even better machines. Intelligence will grow and grow. The body will survive the low and high temperatures, will not afraid of radiation. Optical sensors can see in wider light waves range. Eventually the brand new epoch will start by us, by humans. Will humanity survive it or die? I don’t know. But definitely our expertise and knowledge will grow and spread beyond the Earth and solar system. Below is a diagram by Ray Kurzweil about six epochs, starting from the primitive evolution of the brain to the conquering of the Universe.

We created technology and now at the epoch on merging technology with human intelligence. The technology epoch is a current world. We are just doing first steps in mastering the methods of biology… A lot of work to do, but it is exciting. It is brand New World! Happy 21th of December, 2012. The world will not end. The world will shift.

It happened to be possible to fit more information to the single pager! We’ve extended EKG slightly, reworked LABs results, reworked measurements (charts) and inserted a genogram. Probably the genogram brings majority of new information in comparison to other updates.

v4 of mEMR concept

Right now the concept of mobile EMR looks this way…

Mobile EMR v4

New ‘All Data’ charts

Initially the charts of measured values have been from dots. Recent analysis and reviews tended to connect the dots, but things are not so straightforward… There could be kind of sparkline for the current period (7-10 days). Applicability of sparkline technique to represent data from the entire last year is suspicious. Furthermore, if more data is available from the past, then it will be a mess rather than a visualization, because there is so narrow space allocated for old data. Sure, the section of the chart could be wider, but does it worth it?

What is most informative from the past periods? Anomalies, such as low and high values, especially in comparison with current values. Hence we’ve left old data as dots, previous year data as dots, and made current short period as line chart. We’ve added min/max points to ease the analysis of the data for MD.

Genogram

Having genogram on the default screen seems very useful. User testing needed to test the concept on real genograms, to check the sizes of genograms used most frequently. Anyhow, it is always possible to show part of the genogram as expanded diagram, while keep some parts collapsed. The genogram could be interactive. When MD clicks on it, she gets to the new screen totally devoted to the genogram with all detailed attributes present. Editing could be possible too. While default screen should represent such view onto the genogram that relates to the current or potential diagnosis the patient has.

In the future the space allocated for the genogram could be increased, based on the speed of evolution of genetic-based treatments. May be visualization of personal genotyping will be put onto the home screen very soon. There are companies providing such service and keeping such data (e.g. 23andme). Eventually all electronic data will be integrated, hence MDs will be able to see patients genotyped data from EMR app on the tablet.

DNA Sequence

This is mid term future. DNA sequencing is still a long process today. But we’ve got the technology how to deliver DNA sequence information onto the tablet. The technology is similar to BigImage(tm). Predefined levels of information deliver could be defined, such as genes, exoms and finally entire genotype. For sure additional layers overlays will be needed to simplify visual perception and navigation thru the genetic information. So technology should be advanced with that respect.